Vergezichten

Two 9+ minute tracks, using mostly Mariska Baars' voice, Espen Reinertsen's saxophone and a Hammond rhythm box as sound sources. Being inspired by Arvo Pärt's choral pieces, I started experimenting with samples of Mariska's singing (which were recorded for a previous album of mine, Shuffle). Then I started implementing the rhythm box, and it became something wholly different, reminding me of this beautiful song.

The press text:

Musicians like Rutger Zuydervelt have a special relationship with presets - sounds, rhythms and samples that are inbuilt to keyboards or synthesizers. Presets are the opposite of individualism in music, they are commodities, sounds off the peg. Self-respecting musicians never use them, or perhaps use them precisely because they shouldn’t. Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek is a master of self-made sound and time-stretching, sensitively handling organic recordings and samples on countless releases, and regards preset sounds in an organ or a cheap keyboard as a tonal find, as a part of the cacophony of every day life. He uses the chugging of a Bontempi rhythm box or preset strings like field recordings, with the same calm and matter-of-factness as the murmur of ventilation or the hum of a refrigerator.

These Bontempi-rhythms plus the computer-stretched sounds of saxophone (Espen Reinertsen) and voice (Mariska Baars) are the base elements of Vergezicht 1 & 2. It is stunning how Zuydervelt manages to produce depth and meditative calm with this supposedly soulless material. Never-ending expanses and the mechanic rhythms overlap and start shifting, slowly and imperceptibly before the beat gets nervous, starts to stumble to finally come to a standstill with the slowly swelling bass. The track is held in suspense, rattling and rustling. Ghostly squeaking breezes in, then another stop with a soft beat of the drum. Slowly, the track builds itself up again with filtered grooves and prolonged notes.

On Vergezicht 2, the Bontempi-rhythm sets in again, after seven minutes of rising and subsiding expanses and the breezy, ethereal soprano, this time slowed down alongside warm basses and single notes from the piano. Then a momentary halt, almost too beautiful and too clean for this track. Soon an ominous siren call floats above the euphony and restores order by friction. This subtle irritation is part of a complete acoustic pattern. It is not possible to imagine Machinefabriek’s music without the irritiating moment, the doubt turned into sound.

The Dutch word ‘Vergezicht’ means view or panorama. And it is a wide acoustic panorama opened by Zuydervelt here that reveal presets in new light.

Reviews

Tiny Mix Tapes

If you’ve ever dicked around on an old Wurlitzer organ at an antique store, or practiced your sixth-grade piano recital on your neighbor’s shitty electric keyboard, or been to thiswebsite, then you’ve probably used drum beat presets.

To some of us, these drum presets (when they are in a keyboard instrument) exist so we can play Pachabel’s Canon in D in a bunch of funny rhythms and try to impress drunken friends. To others, they serve as the groundwork to build cutesy twee tunes. For Dutch musician Rutger Zuydervelt (a.k.a. Machinefabriek), built-in presets on a musical instrument are just another everyday noise, sounds of our planet that should be recorded as if they were a babbling brook or a tribal rain dance.

On his newest release, Vergezichten, Machinefabriek weaves in a whirly organ preset rhythm through layers of hovering ambience and rumbling bass tones, as if it were a rare field recording of a spontaneous, unique moment in time. Zuydervelt’s like bajillionth release is a 10-inch record out on March 15 from Alien Transistor, and comes with (as always) impeccably designed artwork.